U.S. Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands (also called the Freedmen’s Bureau) in 1865 and gave
the bureau the job of aiding and protecting the four million slaves who
became free through the American Civil War (1861–65).
Under the direction of General Oliver O. Howard (1830–1909), the
Freedmen’s Bureau divided the former slave states into ten districts.
Relief work in those districts focused on five tasks: relief for all citizens,
black and white alike, in war-torn areas; regulation of black labor; management of abandoned and confiscated property; administration of justice for blacks; and education of former slaves. (See Slavery.)
The Freedmen’s Bureau had poor funding and inadequate staffing,
but it still managed to offer much-needed assistance. Working through
its programs, the bureau distributed more than twenty-two million rations of food to impoverished black and white southerners. It provided
medical assistance to more than one million freedmen. By 1871, the bureau had created sixty-one schools and eleven colleges and universities.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was less successful in its effort to create
courts for protecting the civil rights of African Americans. It also failed
to make land ownership a reality for freed slaves. Congress had intended
to transfer large amounts of confiscated southern lands to former slaves,
but this was thwarted by the Proclamation of Pardon and Amnesty by
President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875; served 1865–69) in 1865. The
proclamation provided for much of the confiscated land to be returned
to white southerners who were willing to take an oath of allegiance to the
United States. The Freedmen’s Bureau was forced instead to oversee the
creation of sharecropping arrangements for farming these lands.
The original charter of the Freedmen’s Bureau was for just one year,
but Congress extended that period for most of the bureau’s work until
1869. Its educational component lasted until 1872.